And then comes the banquet, which always features - right before the Katzenjammers bop in - an after-dinner talk by a Princeton luminary. Every year I am startled anew at how a supremely talented artist and a crowd of not-yet-jaded kids actually manage to put purpose into the MPR. It didn't matter last Saturday night that there were some problems with the microphone or, as Professor Gowin lamented, that no projection of photographs onto a screen, much less an ordinary pull-down screen in an oversized, low-ceilinged basement, can do serious pictures justice. Gowin was quirky and brilliant, which is what students expect us members of the faculty to be. But he was also lyrical - and if students start expecting this as well, then most of us are in trouble.
I can't pretend to know much of anything about photography, but Gowin is famous and all you have to do is see his work to know why. Quite likely you've seen some of it one way or another already: maybe the snapshot of the girl with the eggs or the photograph of the revolting "aeration pond" at a toxic water-treatment facility that looks like an alien opponent of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith (unfortunately, it is very real and in Arkansas). In the past couple of decades, Gowin has turned away from intimate family portraits and concentrated instead on flying over and capturing people-less landscapes that people have marred: the craters at Yucca Flat in the Nevada Test Site, for example, where over 700 nuclear tests were conducted between 1951 and 1992. The images are at the same time beautiful and scary, thoughtful and nightmarish.
In his thoroughly unpretentious talk, Gowin wove a portrait of a reluctant student who became an award-winning artist and teacher thanks to two simple things: the understated help he got from his own great teacher, Harry Callahan, and the pleasure he takes in the company of his extended family. Of course being exceptionally talented has helped also, though he was too modest to say so. The simple fact is that Gowin sees things that others don't. But the good news is that this is to some extent true of everybody. And so to this bunch of top students eager to head off to college and shape themselves and the world we all inhabit, Gowin rightly said that they should trust their intuitions and find ways to record what they see - because if they don't, maybe no one will ever see, no one will ever know.
One of the things my conversations that evening made clear is that so many of these prospective members of the Class of 2013 are interested in both the arts and the humanities. This is a very good thing. (Many of them are also interested in the sciences. That's a very good thing, too.) But what will happen when they come here? Thanks in no small part to the generosity of Peter Lewis '55 and the energy of Paul Muldoon, the University has been making a very visible and very welcome commitment to the arts. It remains to be seen, however, whether the academic humanities - which, practiced well, are no less creative - will receive anything like the same level of support. Just a couple of years ago, Gowin and his colleagues were affiliated with the Council of the Humanities; now they are part of the Lewis Center. Led by Gideon Rosen GS '92, the Council continues to do many wonderful things, including run the legendary "Humanities Sequence" (HUM 216-219), which at the start of this semester had a long waiting list and which many of the high-school Symposiasts may wish to take in the fall of 2009. But there is only so much that an academic body can do when most of its faculty is taken away.
Emmet Gowin said, lyrically, "The unknown is friendlier than you think: It's priceless." I hope the future of the Council of the Humanities is friendly. One hundred one million dollars sure wouldn't hurt.
Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics, the Director of the Program in Linguistics and a Forbes faculty adviser. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.
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